Marlowe, Marlowe... Marlowe?

· In an autumn blessed - or cursed - with three novels about Henry James (a fourth is reportedly sans publisher) one would think that the gods of simultaneity had had their fun. Not so: there are also two novels about Christopher Marlowe: History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe, by Rodney Bolt, which assumes that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare's plays, and Tamburlaine Must Die, by Louise Welsh, a colourful reimagining of a colourful man's death.

Both were to be found at the Cheltenham Festival this week, aggravating the general slippage between fact and fiction; as Bolt pointed out, we really don't know that much about either author; writing their biographies is about taking a handful of facts and stringing them together with a lots of conjecture. Welsh maintained there wasn't any point writing historical fiction unless it illuminated the present; for her, Elizabethan London's dislike of immigrants was strikingly familiar.

· At the reading in honour of Faber's 75th birthday - by Jo Shapcott, Tom Paulin and Andrew Motion - there were many perceptive queries from the floor, but one particularly pointed one. "I know you do them for publicity; but do you find readings an ordeal?" "It's a mixed blessing," replied Shapcott, who said she loved trying out new poems, meeting other poets. She was being diplomatic; the room had just been in uproar over the first question, an attack on Paulin's views on Israel: "We don't want to listen to it!" chorussed members of the audience, turning on the questioner. "Shut up!" Discussion of children's poetry and the poets' own bedtime reading followed.

· The week before rare book dealer Rick Gekoski had entertained an audience at the LRB bookshop with the tale of his greatest mistake. Following a recommendation from his friend Graham Greene, he flew to Moscow to meet Rufina Philby, Kim Philby's last wife, and discovered she was sitting on a treasure trove: the books in Philby's library (including a copy of Spycatcher, inscribed "to Kim and Rufina, with love from Graham and Yvonne"); and his archive, the real gold - an unpublished autobiography, a book on Philby annotated by Philby and lecture notes, giving tips on how to get on in England, from when he was training Russian spies in.

Attempting to be a British Library and Rufina go-between, however, Gekoski was outfoxed by the second in command of the KGB, an ex-student of Philby's and friend of Rufina's, now, as he described himself, "entrepreneur"; the collection went to Sotheby's, which split it into lots. Gekoski still wishes he had thought quicker, tried harder: "That material is distributed now in such a way that it would be almost inconceivable for a researcher, even one as assiduous as Norman Sherry, to find it all and use it to tell the Philby story. I regret having such a deleterious effect on a part of 20th-century history."